Tungle.me

» see tungle.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i never had a tungle.me link. the people who traded them were sales teams and the assistants of fortune 1000 executives, and in 2011 i was a computer engineer in ankara who still booked the odd meeting over msn and email. tungle solved a problem i mostly did not have. that does not make it a small thing, it just means i watched it from the outside.

marc gingras started it in montreal in 2006 and put it in front of people at demo the next year. the idea was small and good. you kept whatever calendar you already used, google or outlook, and tungle sat on top as a public page. someone who wanted time with you saw your free slots and picked one, no email chain, no six replies to land on a wednesday that worked. by 2011 it claimed use at around eight hundred universities and something close to forty percent of the fortune 1000.

research in motion bought the company in april 2011. this was already the era of blackberry sliding, for whatever reason, and rim wanted the team more than the product. they were folded into the calendar for the playbook first, then the native calendar for blackberry 10, the operating system that was supposed to save the whole company. the standalone tungle.me kept running a while as a courtesy. then on 3 december 2012 it was switched off, and everyone was told to go use the thing being built into a phone almost nobody would buy.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it solved ~

the problem tungle picked was real and boring, which is the best kind to solve. finding a meeting time across two companies is a slow ache of an email thread, each side guarding a calendar the other cannot see. tungle's answer was to expose just the free-busy layer and nothing else, a link that let a stranger book you without seeing your day. calendly would later build a whole business out of exactly this shape, and doodle had its own version, so the idea outlived the product by more than a decade. tungle was just early, and early is a hard place to get bought out of.

~ the acqui-hire ~

nothing dramatic killed tungle. it worked, it had users, and then it got absorbed into a company that was itself dying, which is a quieter way to go than most. rim was betting everything on blackberry 10, and the tungle people spent 2011 and 2012 building calendar software for a platform that shipped late into a market the iphone had already taken. when the site closed that december the announcement was polite and short. the team stayed at blackberry a while longer, but the little montreal scheduler with the clever url was gone, one of the many small useful tools that got folded away on the way down.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »